I know Debian and others can breathe life into older machines. But i wonder if there are any distros with serious optimizations that I haven’t heard of. I’ve already tried MX Linux on an old Thinkpad SL400, and didn’t see any difference from plain Debian.

Update: thanks for the great suggestions. Forgot to say many distros feel zippy and fast until you open a web browser. Appreciate your thoughts on which web browser to use too. So far I’ve had a positive experience with Thorium and Chromium.

    • ipsirc@lemmy.mlEnglish
      22·
      8 months ago

      All three are just a reskinned Debian, as is MX Linux.

      • L3ft_F13ld!
        2·
        8 months ago

        Absolutely. Just makes it a bit faster to get a slightly customised Debian out of the box.

        • ipsirc@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          8 months ago

          What makes it a bit faster specifically? I’ve been interested for a long time.

          • L3ft_F13ld!
            2·
            8 months ago

            You install and it’s lightweight and already customised. If you like it, you’re done. Gets you started much faster than customising from scratch. If you mean performance, then it’s faster because they don’t come with a full desktop environment. They’re just using the Openbox window manager. Once you get used so it it’s perfectly usable.

            • ipsirc@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              8 months ago

              What makes it lightweight when it uses the same packages with the same dependencies? And what does prevent me from install openbox on Debian?

              • L3ft_F13ld!
                1·
                8 months ago

                Like I said before, it gets you started faster than doing it yourself. If you don’t want to configure every little detail yourself then these are great options to get you going.